Strange Conversation

Christmas Village in Review

2012-01-11T16:53:00.002-06:00

I’m blogging over at Church of the Resurrection today, sharing the tip of the iceberg of the craziness that was Christmas Village. The post focuses on the missions aspect of the Village, but much of my Christmas Village time was in the days and weeks before, setting up and taking down, rounding up and organizing volunteers, and making sure the cookies were plentiful and the hot chocolate kept flowing.

I shared at Rez the amount of money we raised, but here are some more numbers:

116 shoppers (people who donated gifts to missionaries)
70 volunteers (probably more, actually) working hard behind the scenes
50 live Christmas trees
12 groups of entertainers — singers and dancers, mostly, but also an exotic petting zoo and a pen of puppies
10 hours of Christmas Festival
8 countries represented -- more about this at RezBlog
7 hours of set up
2 hours of take down
1 break in the evening for the Christmas Pageant

Blade was invaluable; he helped run errands with me all day and made sure I got something to eat besides cookies.

I slept most of the following day, the whole thing was so exhausting, but it was all totally worth it.

You can get poetry-ness.

2011-10-01T23:26:00.003-05:00

Blade and I saw The House's production of Cyrano on our honeymoon. I considered writing a review of it, but Ada Grey beat me to the punch.

Ada Grey, if you don't know, is my favorite Chicago theater critic. She is 7 years old. She has this to say about the end of Cyrano:

I think she actually loves him in the end, but he never actually gets to marry her like he wants to. Everybody in the audience was touched except if the Joker was there. Then he would not be touched, because he is a supervillain. Catwoman and Poison Ivy would because they are more gentle-hearted than others.

Here are a few more gems.

On The Adventures of Pinocchio and Emperor's New Clothes:

I like grown-up shows better than kids' shows, which is weird because I am a kid. Kids' shows I can love them, but I don't double love them. Some grown-up shows have romance, adult jokes, killing people, tough words. If you don't know all the words it makes the play more complicated, and then it makes it a puzzle, and it is more fun to figure out.

On Macbeth:

I would recommend Macbeth for ages 10 and up, but I am a very brave 7 year old.

On Liza Minnelli's Daughter:

At the end, her clothes were regular. ... She looked like a person that didn't do any plays at all.

When I am just wearing regular clothes, I feel lonely because it makes me feel like I am not Ada Grey. I am just a girl wandering around. I am not somebody; I'm nobody.

Don't you want to be her best friend?

I think this is the proper use of a 7 year old girl. Remind me of this if I ever have a 7 year old.

In the Major Life Transitions department ...

2011-09-03T20:36:00.000-05:00

"Alyssa's been a glutton for punishment in the Major Life Transitions department these last few weeks." - Meredith

You may surmise these things from my blog silence:

1. I picked up a second job working at my church. I love it, but it means I'm still adjusting to 45-50 hour weeks (instead of 25-30, which is what I'd been working before).

MORE IMPORTANTLY:

2. Blade and I got married!


On the left: My dad, having just walked me down the aisle to Blade. On the right: The vows, which were, incidentally, officiated by my new boss.

And everything was wonderful. Friends, family, amazing food, hundreds of my mom's paper flowers ... check out more pictures on Maggie Fortson's blog. (Blade and I were a little nervous about pictures, since both of us are camera shy, but Maggie set us at ease. We highly recommend her!)

The only thing that didn't go according to plan: We'd bought tickets to fly to New York City for our honeymoon, but we found out on Friday (the night before the wedding) that Hurricane Irene had shut down all flights to and from NYC.

We ended up staying in Chicago, only 45 minutes from our own apartment, but that turns out to be the best thing we could have done. I wouldn't have wanted to mess with an airport that evening, and we already know our way around Chicago. That meant we could spend our running-around-the-city time visiting the Art Institute and seeing a play at The House rather than wasting energy trying to navigate an unfamiliar subway system.

Today, in celebration of our one week anniversary, we have been lazy around our apartment. (I've been lazier than Blade, who made delicious chicken for supper.) It's raining outside, and we have good books to read. We are cozy.

Exit, Pursued by Bear

2011-08-10T13:52:00.009-05:00

I have a history of shrugging off minor bumps and bruises only to find out later that I should have gone to the doctor immediately. So when I got a strange spot on my skin -- could that be a spider bite? -- I decided would rather be extra cautious and had Blade take me to an immediate care clinic.

When I mentioned it on Facebook, my friend Steve replied that he'd just been to the ER. Right now, Steve and two of our other good friends, Marty and Tim, are backpacking in the mountains in Colorado. I was afraid one of them had fallen off a cliff or something.

Me (on Facebook): As everyone knows, the best way to finish a Very Long Day is at the urgent care center.

Steve (via text): Small world! We were at the emergency room last night, too!

Me: Who was hurt? Are you all ok now?!

Steve: Yes. Sorry, that was mean. Marty had a weird altitude-related breathing thing, but they checked him out and he's completely fine now.

Me: My awful sore was caused by falling asleep at the computer.* First world problems.

Steve: Marty's lung pain was caused by ascending and descending a 13,000 ft mountain too fast. Awesomely-in-shape-super-badass-problems. ...

Me: Do not scare me like that, Slagg.

Steve: You did the same thing to Facebook!

Me: Sort of, but urgent care and the ER are nowhere near the same thing. Urgent care is for bug bites and flu shots, things like that. The ER is for when you get mauled by a bear while camping.

Steve: Fair enough. No, getting mauled by a bear isn't likely to happen until tonight. ...

*I take medicine at night for a sleeping problem, and I usually have about half an hour before it kicks in. Once it kicks in, though, I'm asleep immediately. This weekend, I misjudged that window of time, and I sat down at the computer to catch up on a couple of things before the medicine knocked me out.

Five hours later, I woke up, still sitting on my couch, with a blister where my arm had been resting on the edge of my laptop.

At least, I thought that's what it was, but I wanted to make sure it wasn't a spider bite, because it was more painful and angry-looking than blisters usually are. I knew a guy who waited too long to treat a spider bite on his leg, and his muscle was permanently damaged, so I am now absolutely paranoid about spider bites.

I am very aware of how ridiculous it is to have a falling-asleep-at-the-computer injury.

Audrey (II) Hepburn would be proud.

2011-07-29T23:45:00.000-05:00

If I've learned anything from an absurd number of viewings of My Fair Lady, it's that flower shops should be overflowing with bright colors, elegant British accents, and extravagant hats. Also, you are required to study linguistics for months before they let you work in a flower shop, don't you know?

I haven't found any florists like that.* I've only visited one, and he didn't seem like a good fit, despite his glowing review on Google:

Seriously? Only one person found this review helpful?

Blade would love a gag carnation, right? I think a single black orchid might have been over the top for an afternoon wedding, but I so had my heart set on carrying a delicate bouquet of Venus flytraps and garage-shaped ivy. They're just so classic, so Audrey.

I'm sure I'm not the only one who can't distinguish between Audrey II (left) and Audrey Hepburn (right).

*Actually, I haven't found a florist at all. When my parents visited last week, my mom brought her paper ~~tendonitis~~ flowers, and I liked them so much that we're not going to bother with fresh flowers at all.

She should at least log her hours.

2011-07-28T21:55:00.002-05:00

Blade and I have been talking about jobs, particularly about how we'll balance our jobs and our friends and our church as a married couple. We started the conversation with our premarital counselor earlier this evening and continued it as we cleaned up our supper dishes in kitchen.

Blade took over loading the dishwasher, and I sat down to think. And this is what I thought --

Me: Something's bothering me.

Blade: Work stuff?

Me: Uh, yeah. How come the Watcher's Council doesn't just pay Buffy?

Blade: Because being the Slayer is a calling, not a job.

Me: But they pay Giles.

Blade: That's different. He chose his job. Buffy was fated.

Me: But Buffy can barely keep a regular job. She should get paid for all the hours she puts in being the Slayer.

Blade: Functionally, I think it would taint the position.

We are absolutely mature grown-ups, who discuss mature, grown-up things.

The Teeth Wore White

2011-07-20T15:15:00.000-05:00

This week, before I went to get my dental check up, I braced myself for another lecture on more consistent flossing. I hadn't planned on needing to justify my approach to our wedding to my dentist.

Dentist, spying my ring: When's the big day?

Me: August 27th.

Dentist: That's not long!

Me: Just under 40 days, yeah.

Dentist: Oh, hon, we're really gonna have to hustle to get your whitening scheduled.

Me: My what?

Dentist: You know, your whitening. So your teeth will be nice and white for your wedding. Most of my brides get at least a couple of treatments.

Me: I'm ok with my teeth.

Dentist: But we could make them even whiter.

Me: No, thanks, I think I'll skip that.

Dentist, frantic: But it's your wedding!

Let's examine the dentist's appeals:

1. "But we could make them even whiter."

What kind of white? As it is, my teeth aren't coffee brown or nicotine yellow. If we were looking for hardware store paint chips to match my teeth, we might find something close in that indistinguishable family of soft off-whites that includes Eggshell, Ecru, Bone, Vanilla, Ivory, Cream.

Those are reasonable colors for teeth to be. I'd be afraid that bleaching would put my teeth more in the family of Politician Smile white and Blank Word Document That Should Have Been A First Draft By Now white.

The underlying argument from the dentist, of course, was: "There are people out there who are prettier than you are, and their teeth are dazzlingly white. Do you have your checkbook with you?"

2. "But it's your wedding!"

From the more reasonable friends and family, this sentence means, "Your wedding is important enough to justify being a little fancier than you normally would," or, "Let us do something nice for you, since getting married is a big deal and we want to help."

However, when a peddler-of-wedding-goods says it, she is attempting to bypass all your logic with her Jedi wedding vendor mind trick nonsense.

Blade and I ran into this mind trickery at Bed Bath and Beyond, too, when we didn't register for some of the fancier stuff we'd never use, and again when a potential caterer couldn't believe we weren't planning on serving a formal, sit-down meal at our reception.

When a vendor says "But it's your wedding," she means, "Your wedding -- and, by extension, your marriage -- won't be as meaningful and impressive and real if you don't purchase these goods and services. Did you say you had your checkbook with you?"

I finally told my dentist I would think about it, because I was tired of the conversation and needed my teeth cleaned so I could move on to the rest of the afternoon. The sound of the polisher blocked out most of the rest of the free wedding advice.

One (Good Enough) Day

2011-07-16T23:40:00.003-05:00

I just threw away three bridal magazines my mom bought me.* We had flipped through them and mocked them to pieces back in March, but they've been collecting dust on top of my sump pump since then.

Bridal magazines are not designed to be helpful, unless you need help spending a crazy amount of money. I guess their checklists are also helpful if you need to laugh until you cry. I've had to turn elsewhere for real wedding help. It's handy that my mom has planned plenty of weddings, but I've also explored books and blogs lately.

I devoured the book One Perfect Day: The Selling of the American Wedding. It is not about how to plan a wedding; it's about how planning weddings got insane.

Here is a short interview with the author, Rebecca Mead:

Here is another (audio only) interview with Mead, in which she talks about why weddings have gotten so huge in the last generation: It's at least partially because getting married isn't as big of a deal as it once was. It used to be that a wedding marked the day you moved out of your parents' home, the first time you lived with and slept with your spouse, etc. Now that people are getting married older and so many couples live together already, we throw extravagant parties to make marriage feel like as big of a transition as it used to be.

Mead's book helped me think through whether any given wedding detail was something Blade and I actually wanted or just something that wedding companies have poured untold amounts of money into marketing to us.

While I was reading One Perfect Day, I was also reading Good News for Anxious Christians, which is about manipulative trends within popular evangelical culture. I couldn't help but see parallels with the wedding industry.** Both the wedding industry and the more wishy-washy evangelical churches put pressure on you to feel certain emotions, and if you don't feel those emotions, there must be something wrong with you. I don't do well under that kind of pressure. I get all panicky and resentful until I understand what's actually going on.

---

The blog A Practical Wedding has been the most helpful resource for actually planning my wedding (as opposed to helping me understand why wedding stuff makes me crazy). Though I frequently disagree with the blog's politics, I appreciate that the posts are full of thought-provoking, tongue-in-cheek writing rather than just collections of stylized pictures. If you're involved in a wedding anytime soon, I recommend exploring the site; I've especially enjoyed the posts: Bride in Exile, Lazy (and possible cheap) Girl's Guide ..., The Slavery of Choice, and Wedding Overexposure.

So Blade and I aren't going for a perfect day. We're going for a good enough day. And if we're married by the end of it, that is plenty good enough.

*I've kept one magazine, mostly because my mom shoplifted it from a bridal salon. She claims it was supposed to be free, that it just looked free, but there's definitely a price tag on the front cover. I can't seem to throw it away just yet due to its shoplifted hilarity. (Seriously? It just looked free? Who thinks like that?)

**My friend Steve saw me toggling between both books and said, "I like that about you." What? "That when you get mad you find a book about whatever's making you mad so you can figure out why."

Let me shun that.

2011-07-12T23:45:00.004-05:00

No more of that.

After helping with a couple of beautiful-but-stressful handmade weddings in the past few years, my mom and I decided that we did not have the energy or the time to fill my wedding with carefully crafted details. I've heard over and over that it's all in the details, but we know it's really not. Also, we have witnessed how those lovely, thoughtful touches can completely consume the bride and her helpers.

And so we were resolved: No projects that would take over our lives and homes. Only small, get-it-done-in-an-afternoon projects allowed.

Then my mom had ankle surgery. She thought it would only put her out of commission for a few days, but when she recovered from the anesthetic, the doctor told her she needed to stay off her feet for six weeks. We had the following, surprisingly lucid, conversation mere hours after her surgery.

Mom: How would you feel about knitted flowers?

Me: Sewn onto a baby hat or something?

Mom: No, for your wedding.

Me: Where are these going to come from?

Mom: I'm going to knit them. I'll make enough to use for centerpieces for all the tables. And your bouquet, if you wanted.

Me: You couldn't even believe how much energy Lauren spent on her flowers, and those were just paper.

Mom: It'll be adorable! Come on, what else am I going to do for the next few weeks?

Me: This is the Vicodin talking, right? This will wear off?

Finally, I told her that if she could find a picture of knitted flowers that didn't look precious, like they belonged on a baby hat or an old lady Christmas sweater, then we'd talk about her knitting flowers. Honestly, I thought she would be too drugged to remember we'd ever had this conversation, or possibly that she was having a stroke and couldn't control her words. But two hours later she called me back.

Mom: Knitted flowers are horrible. Forget that.

Me: Thank you.

Mom: I'm making them out of paper instead.

Me: Oh, that way madness lies.

I tried to talk her out of it; for one thing, I didn't want her to have to spend all her spare time fussing over my wedding. More importantly, it's a slippery slope from handmade flowers to handmade wedding favors and handmade emotional breakdowns.

But I relented. The flowers looked good and were less time-intensive than Lauren's, and they gave Mom something to do while she rested her foot and watched Slings and Arrows.*

At a follow-up appointment about her ankle, her doctor found that she has a new injury, this time in her elbow. It's the kind of injury that comes from performing detailed, repetitive tasks, like, say, making hundreds of tiny paper flowers. Let this be a warning.

*See? She does have good taste, knitted flowers notwithstanding.

There are no passports in ten minutes.

2011-07-08T08:00:00.000-05:00

Again, from Hyperbole and a Half, whose post on adulthood pops into my mind all too regularly.

Continuing on my logistical failure when paperwork is involved ...

This fall, due to some combination of peer pressure and family obligation, I'm going on a trip to Israel with basically everyone I know.*

I've turned my apartment upside-down looking for my passport. There's no telling where it could be. It could have gotten lost during one of the seven times I've moved since I last used it four years ago. I have to give in and get a new passport.

The local passport office is in the post office; rather, it is the post office. The clerks that weigh packages and sell stamps are the same clerks that process passport requests. The post office is open until 7pm, but the clerks will only handle the passports until 3pm, though the sign says 3:30pm. There's also the odd day when they close at noon or refuse to handle passports at all, and these usually seem to coincide with the times that I am off work and able to go to the post office.

I made it in before that 3pm deadline a few days ago and ran into what should have been a small speed bump.

Clerk: I need your actual birth certificate, not a copy.

Me: Oh! That's easy. I can run home and be back with it in ten minutes.

Clerk: I can't do it in ten minutes.

Me: But you'll be at this same counter for four more hours.

Clerk: Yes.

Me: But you won't help me if I come back in ten minutes.

Clerk: No. There are no passports in ten minutes.

I returned the next day to try again. The first clerk was struggling with her English, and some complications with my paperwork (mostly due to my confusing driver's license issues) made it impossible for us to communicate. She transferred me to another clerk, who was able to be more helpful, especially after I got frustrated enough to cry.

This clerk recognized me from the several times I'd been in before to try and get this goofy passport. She made some phone calls and found some loopholes, and now my passport is being expedited. Although I can't cry on cue, I absolutely believe it would have gone even less smoothly if I hadn't let myself cry.

Still, I'm terrified that this Very Expensive envelope that contains my original birth certificate is headed to an office like the Department of Records from Brazil:

*The trip has the potential to be awesome, actually. I just wish it were next fall, after Blade and I have had some time to get used to being married.

Us and Them(es)

2011-07-05T08:15:00.000-05:00

This is not a thing we're doing for at least three distinct reasons.

As I said in my wedding FAQ's, I've been asked this question more than once:

Q: You're getting married? Congratulations! What's your theme?

A: Oh, you know, marriage.

More detailed A: Our wedding will be straight from the Book of Common Prayer, hopefully with a little music by friends, and there will be snacks. By the end of it, we'll be married.

People* who haven't recently spent time flipping through wedding magazines and blogs** might be unaware, but all the cool weddings these days have themes. Not explorations of timeless ideas and universal questions, like in literature; more like pervasive motifs, like in amusement parks and children's birthday parties.

Some people manage to have a theme in an un-obnoxious way. Here are an Amelie wedding and an Up wedding that pull it off sweetly. My brother and sister-in-law also rocked an Alice in Wonderland theme for their reception (after a BCP ceremony). Those are fun to go to, but they don't suit Blade and me. Also, these weddings are unusually labor-intensive, and, as Lisa puts it, I react to wedding chores the way Harry Potter characters react to Dementors.

And let's not forget that wedding themes often veer into crazy: How about a Star Wars wedding? Or a pirate theatrical classic rock wedding? (Both of these weddings were recently posted on Offbeat Bride, where a staggering number of weddings feature a TARDIS.)

People obviously put loads of care into themed weddings, but, at least from the pictures, many of these events seem less about sacrament and more about entertainment.

I wonder if this trend toward themes is a reaction against being told What Is Expected for a Proper Wedding over and over by (mostly) well-meaning friends and family from the moment you get engaged. I respond to that pressure by delegating to someone more useful than I am, just before I curl into a fetal position. I'm lucky that the people whose opinions matter most to me also like laid back, simple things.

*This is most people, right? I hope and pray that it is most people.
**Most of which are designed to make you insane.

Now, that's a pipe of a different color.

2011-07-03T12:00:00.019-05:00

Responsibility trophy from "This Is Why I'll Never Be An Adult"

I am frequently quite grown up. I go to work, cook for myself, and return my library books on time. My apartment is clean enough not to embarrass me if a surprise guest were to show up at my door, and my bills are promptly settled with checks that do not bounce.

However, all of this grown-up pulled-together-ness dissolves the moment bureaucracy and paperwork are introduced.

I need to renew my driver's license. After studying for the written test, waiting for an hour at the DMV, getting sent to a different DMV, not being let inside the second DMV after waiting in the out-the-door line for another hour ...

Security guard: What's the point of letting you be in this line if you're missing part of the paperwork?

Me: But I have a question about that part, can you answer it?

Security guard: No, I don't know anything about that. The people inside would know.

Me: But you won't let me inside to ask.

Security guard: No. It's not worth anyone's time.

... and realizing that I'm going to have to go through this whole process again anyway when I change my name this fall, I had one of my patented being-a-grown-up-is-hard breakdowns* and called my dad to help bail me out.

It turns out that I can't actually get that awful paperwork without my dad signing over the title of my car to me, which he can't do until we're in the same place, which won't be until long after my license has expired. The best solution seemed to be to mail order a renewed Texas license to tide me over until I get my married name.

I had hoped to commiserate with my friend Steve, who also needs to renew his license, but he has elected to drive six hours each way to a DMV in middle-of-nowhere Missouri rather than deal with the dread Illinois office.

What we could all use is a rogue DMV clerk, like Robert DeNiro's vigilante HVAC repairman in Brazil.** He could burst in, fully armed, and bypass the whole system without so much as a 27b/6.

*To the layperson, these are very like my wedding-details-are-overwhelming breakdowns.

**I seem to watch mostly movies and TV shows that feed my paranoia.

Wedding FAQ

2011-07-01T00:32:00.002-05:00

Don't we look engaged?

I will now tackle the questions I have been asked by many friends, acquaintances, former coworkers' relatives, and passing strangers ever since Blade gave me a sparkly ring. Let's put some of these to rest now.

Q: When did you get engaged?!

A: January. Or March, depending on how you count it.

Q: How did Blade propose?

A: By asking. The first time, in January, I had already taken some medicine that makes me Very Sleepy, so I don't remember a lot of details, except that we decided not to tell anyone until we had a chance to talk to our families. The second time, in March, was in my car after I picked Blade up from the airport. He was returning from California, where he talked to his parents about getting married, and they gave him a ring for me. He waited until the car was in park so that I wouldn't run off the road.

Q: Ring! Ring ring ring!

A: That's not a question. But the answer is that it belonged to Blade's great-grandmother, and I love it. We're having his ring made out of jewelry from my great-grandmother, who happened to be a loan shark. Long story.

Q: What is your theme?

A: Oh, you know, marriage.

Q: So you're having a big wedding, then?

A: Again, that is not a question, really. That's an assumption, and no, we're not. We're having as small a wedding as we can manage while still including our families as well as friends that we both know. Blade and I lean toward the introverted side of things and get easily overwhelmed by crowds, so a big wedding didn't seem like the best option for us. We think everyone is great, but we don't have room for everyone all at once.

Q: Are you stressed about wedding planning?

A: Only when I have to do something wedding-ish, which is not that often. Blade made the invitations and website, and my temporarily-crippled mother is flexing her Martha muscles while she recovers from ankle surgery. (She isn't allowed to be on her feet for awhile, which means she's itching for things to make with her hands.) A couple of months ago, she helped me dress shop, and she's handled most interactions with our caterer and venue.

This doesn't leave me a lot to do, really, which is good, because wedding chores instantly fill me with anxiety. I tear up, my nose gets itchy, I have to eat some chocolate and lie down -- it's this whole big thing. Then I want to drag Blade to a courthouse and skip the cake-and-photographer-and-flowers mess. The number one reason we haven't given up and eloped is because we want our marriage to begin with a sacrament, not just a legal form.

Q: Do you resent how the wedding industry has deliberately and systematically brainwashed the entire country over the last several generations?*

A: Why, yes. Yes, I do.

Do you have a question that I missed?

* That nobody has actually asked me this question is something I attribute to the thoroughness of the brainwashing. Also, it's just possible I watch too many Joss Whedon shows.

Together we are fierce.

2011-06-25T23:45:00.000-05:00

You know how sometimes you put off doing the dishes for so long that your sink is filled to the point that if you turn on the faucet the water just sprays off the plate and splatters watery marinara on your shirt? That is how it starts to feel if you have a blog that you haven't updated in months, not because there was nothing to say, but because all the things there were to say were Very Important and you wanted to do them justice.

So I will not try to do them justice. Instead, I will post pictures of cake.

---

My fiancé, Blade, made me a giant cookie to celebrate my upcoming birthday.

I can't look at it without giggling. He was inspired by this Marc Johns drawing of two people in a monster.

I responded with an ice cream cake to celebrate Blade's birthday, which was earlier this week.

This is no hamburger cake, but I am proud of it. It was inspired by this drawing of a bear.

We ate our cakes with Marty (whose classy cheesecake I didn't manage to photograph due to its lack of icing cartoons). His birthday is also coming up soon. Many of our friends came for the festivities. All the cool kids got themselves born in June. Together we are fierce.

Girlfriends. Also, narwhals.

2011-02-23T23:32:00.042-06:00

Somehow, possibly because someone on the women's committee got me confused with one of my friends, I am heading up drama for my church's women's retreat, which will focus on female friendship.

My first thought was to adapt scenes from plays. I spent hours in the library and came up with nothing that passed my modified Bechdel test -- that is, that contained at least two women, {modification: who are not sisters or mother/daughter,} who have names, who speak to one another about something other than men.

Because of the nature of church retreats, improv isn't going to work, so I am supposed to write or adapt scripts for three short scenes.

There are reasons I am not qualified to do this. In outline form, those reasons are:

1. I have never been on a women's retreat. At any church. Ever.
A) Aren't they for moms?
    B) Or at least grown-ups?
    C) I'm little.

2. I have never written a script.
    A) Remembering words is hard.
    B) Things always seem funnier when everyone discovers them together.
    C) I don't have good ideas when I'm by myself.
       a) A girl who has a theater background is talking out the scripts with me.
          i) It helps.
          ii) But only if she's there.
       b) Seriously, can I just have a couple of solid ensemble members and a suggestion of anything at all?

3. I am not good at female friendship.
A) My ratio of guy friends to girl friends* is something like 9:2. If we expand that to friends I've had for over three years and still regularly interact with, that ratio is more like 9:1.
       a) I'm better friends with people I play with regularly.
   i) I mostly play with boys.
             ii) Why do girls quit playing?
   b) I do not have a roommate.
             i) My boyfriend has 5 roommates.
             ii) See 3.A.a.i.
             iii) A big part of me would rather spend a weekend being goofy with them than being awkwardly polite to women who I am sure are perfectly lovely and fun but with whom I'm not comfortable because I am shy-ish. Which I should and will just suck up and deal with.
         c) I have tried to put myself in situations to be better friends with women, particularly at church.
            i) They all seem to have a lot of girlfriends already.
            ii) It's hard to tell if there's room for more.
    B) When Blade tried to get me to brainstorm and feel more positive, he said, "Tell me a story about two narwhals. Who are friends. And also are girls."
         a) So I told a story about two narwhals
            i) who were friends
            ii) and also were girls.
         b) They swam around together for awhile, and that was fun.
   c) One day they looked around and realized they had been swimming in different directions for a long time and couldn't remember the last time they floated by each other.
i) Neither could remember why.
            ii) Neither of them did anything to remedy the lack-of-proximity situation.
iii) No one ever talked about it.
            iv) Hey, I wonder where that gal went, I liked her.
            v) Shrug.
   d) The End.

With the generous help of newfriend 2.C.a, I have two scripts and one outline with some wiggle room in it. I feel pretty good about them. Still, it should not have been this angsty to come up with under 10 minutes of material. And my brainstorm story should not have been so sad.

*In this particular case, I am defining friend as "someone with whom I regularly interact, whose life I know and care about, and who knows and cares about my life." There are loads of people, guys and gals, I think fondly of but don't ever see or keep in touch with due to geographical distance or such wildly disparate schedules that when we do see one another we have to start off with something like, "So how was that thing you were doing last year? Where do you work again? Are you still dating that guy? Oh, wait, you moved? When did you move?"

Pretty cunning, don't you think?

2011-01-10T22:23:00.000-06:00

This is my friend Liz.

Liz's apartment is often filled with balloons.

Liz makes movies. Last year, she learned all sorts of useful things, like how to cook and how to play tag. She's gearing up to teach other people things this year, so we'll see how that goes for her.

Real Liz (as opposed to HowToLiz, a distinction that can be wonderfully blurry some days) and I get together most weeks to watch TV, eat snacks, pray, and talk. I taught her to crochet not long ago, so now we are crafty together, too.

I made her a hat* for Christmas. It is featured about 3 minutes into her latest episode:

*The hat is Jayne's hat from Firefly. He receives it about 5:50 into this clip.

Aw, Miracle Cat ...

2011-01-05T22:30:00.008-06:00

Back in November, Stradivarius and the Other Kinds* recorded a Bat as a Christmas present for our friend Duke, whom we miss. The only advertising we did was through a Facebook event, which told us to expect 12 people including the performers. By the time the show started, we had 70 or 80 people in the audience. Maybe more. Such a fun surprise.

The recording arrived in Laos via Thailand last week. Now that Duke's had first dibs, I can post the show online. Download it here: Daylight Savings Bat (aka "Miracle Cat") -- 11/6/2010

I listened to a piece of it for the first time the other day. It's always awkward to watch or listen to shows you performed. Besides the "does my voice really sound like that?" feeling, my main reaction is to be overwhelmed that people seem to enjoy when my friends and I sit around for half an hour and say strange things into the dark.

My favorite element of the show is how many of the later scenes grew out of a mistake in the beginning. In the third scene of the first beat, Marty asks Meredith why he would even bring up the cat --- now that I hear it, he clearly intended to convey that the cat had died. However, Kevin and I didn't pick up on that nuance at the moment, and we mewed as though the cat were on the porch.

At this point, Marty and Meredith had several options for dealing with our mistake:

1. Ignore us and move on like they never heard the mewing.
2. Call us out as a new cat or a stray.
3. Acknowledge us as the same cat and
    a) ignore/deny Marty's earlier implication about the cat being dead.
    b) kill the evil zombie cat.
    c) treat cat resurrection as a normal occurance.
    d) get excited about a miracle.

I am so pleased they chose to be excited rather than force everything into making real-world sense or killing off what didn't fit into their preconception. Miracle Cat mistakes are my favorite kind of mistakes.

*Stradivarius and the Other Kinds is**: Josh Blaney, Skizz Cheney, Meredith Malony, Kevin McLenithan, Marty Jones, and me, with generous assistance from Brendon Culhane and Blade Barringer.

**Or at least, it was for that show. We may grow and rearrange soon.

O Tree Most Fair and Lovely

2010-12-16T21:55:00.002-06:00

Last year, I hacked my own apartment's Christmas tree out of an upside-down tomato cage covered in green fabric. It got the job done in a minimalist kind of way.

This year, my friend Sarah decided that a tomato cage Christmas tree was unacceptable, and she gave me the present of a little artificial tree, perfect for my apartment.

The trouble was that I didn't technically have any Christmas ornaments. So the first Sunday of Advent, I invited my boyfriend Blade and my friend Steve over to help me make decorations.

Here is what we came up with:

Your skirt's crooked.

I did end up finding a handful of little glass ball ornaments at a garage sale. The tree skirt is actually one of my summer skirts, and the garland and flowers are pieces of a long-abandoned crochet project. We used paint chips from Home Depot instead of buying construction paper.

Upon closer examination, you will notice:

The Amazing Technicolor Dream Bear

I crocheted him last winter as a test run for a baby shower present.

The Christmas Caterpillar


He started out as one of those paper kissing balls you make in 3rd grade art class, but that failed, so he became a squinty little caterpillar.

The Abominable Cyclops

Blade made the happiest cyclops in the world.

The Seraph

I told Steve I wanted an angel topper. He made one of those scary angels from Isaiah, all covered in wings and eyes.

I'm not sure it would win Martha Stewart's approval, but it's worlds cheerier than the tomato cage.

Carol's Off the Christmas List

2010-12-01T23:15:00.004-06:00

This is me with my friends Brendon (left) and Kevin (center). We are full of accurate information about the Festival of Lessons and Carols, which will be put on next week by Church of the Resurrection.

In a short form improv show, Madrigal only takes about two minutes to perform, even if you allow time for Brendon to come up with one of his increasingly complicated Origins of the Madrigal speeches. So I thought it would the three of us, veteran town criers that we are, no more than half an hour to film a Madrigal, especially without the pressure of a live audience.*

Apparently, having never made a short film before, I am naive about time. It took about two hours. (Brendon, who has made short films, insists we made good time.)

We filmed take after take, not only inventing new lyrics as we went but also playing with the frame and our presentation: Oh, no, we have to redo that one, Kevin stumbled on his words, Brendon was singing in a different key, Alyssa moved completely off the screen, were we supposed to be looking at the camera that time? None of these things would matter in front of a live audience, but they're noticeable and annoying on camera. So we would try again just one more time. And one more time after that.

After two hours of one-more-time's, we decided we had a passable take and called it quits for the night. Brendon suggested that, since we were finished working on the announcement, we should turn the camera back on and be ridiculous for awhile. The pressure was off, so we tried to do everything exactly wrong, just for the fun of it.

That's the version we actually kept, the throwaway take we filmed at midnight. In comparison, the other takes look labored, like we were Trying to Be Right. The performance was better when we stopped needing to be right and really played.

Good work, Kevin and Brendon!

And if you're in the Wheaton/Chicago area, come to Lessons and Carols! We didn't make up that part about hot chocolate and Legos!

---

*It turns out that I am less nervous in front of an audience than in front of a camera. The bigger the audience, the less nervous I get. I am the opposite of everyone.

Del Close on Harold and Rhymes

2010-11-16T15:55:00.002-06:00

I stumbled upon this 1986 video of Del Close talking about Harold.

"By this time, the scenes are beginning to relate, ... to rhyme with each other in some mad, conceptual way."

I love that idea, the idea that scenes can rhyme with one another. I'm horrible at actual rhyming games, where I'm asked to make up a song and have it make sense and be in rhythm on top of making it rhyme. I'm always the first out in elimination rhyme games like "Da Doo Run Run" and "Beastie Rap."

But I am good at seeing patterns within individual scenes and over the big picture of the show. I had never thought of those patterns as rhymes before, but they kind of are. Different scenes that have the same taste to them, characters whose motivations echo one another's, status interactions that parallel each other, objects and gestures that take on new significance each time they are used.

I love mad, conceptual rhymes.

Fellow improvisers, can you spot the following in the Del interview?

At least one sentence that is quoted word-for-word in Charna Halpern's Art By Committee
A performer who is currently famous (by improv standards) but is not mentioned at all in Del's monologue
An unattributed Keith Johnstone quote
A thinly veiled criticism of 1980's Second City

Harold with Your Eyes Closed

2010-11-12T00:45:00.023-06:00

When I teach improv workshops or coach troupes, my first order of business is to get them comfortable with Harold. Harold is the simplest long form, but it is not necessarily easy. To an audience, it looks like an improvised play. To an improviser, the breakdown looks something like this:

Infographic by Dyna Moe, via Story Robot

Harold gets a lot of flack. Some workshops and troupes have told me Harold is too basic for them and they want to move on to something more sophisticated. (Ironically, those are usually the groups who don't do well with risk, and their Harolds are dull as a result.) Others have told me they didn't want to do Harold because it was impossible. (Maybe it is impossible, but I've seen it done so many times, and I've done it myself.)

Harold is an excellent barometer for how a troupe is really doing, especially when it comes to spotting games and patterns, heightening, and reincorporation. No one moves past Harold. Your Harolds get weirder or more elegant as you grow as a player and as a troupe, but a good Harold is never boring. If you can do Harold, you can do anything.

---

Some friends and I have been getting together for the past several weeks to work on our improv. There are six or seven of us, depending on the night, and we are called Stradivarius and the Other Kinds. We were each in wheatonIMPROV, but we had never all played together. We were in different eras of the club and on different troupes. Given the range of experience, I foresaw our practices being a little rocky as we fought to reconcile our various approaches to improv and life.

So I was wonderfully surprised when, twenty minutes into our first practice, the group mind clicked. I think it was because of the following two things: (1) We respect one another, despite not have much shared stage time under our belts, and (2) we all have a thorough grasp of Harold. We could do a Harold with our eyes closed. In fact, that is exactly what we did. ... More on that later.

Relearning Church through Improv

2010-11-04T08:00:00.002-05:00

Confession: Church did not teach me how Christians should act.

Church -- at least, the two churches I grew up in -- modeled for me that when two Christians disagree, one of them is wrong and needs to repent so the other one can lord their mistakes over them and call it forgiveness.

I learned that the best response to conflict is to quit and start another church two miles away and force people to ~~choose whom they like best~~ pray about where God is leading them.

I discovered that the key to avoiding these kinds of conflicts is to seem pulled together and in control. One easy way to do that is to volunteer to give announcements at youth group. Anyone on stage must have things all figured out, right?

Especially, I saw that the more you respect and trust a leader, the more devastating it is when they fail or they turn on you, and that those relationships are irreperable.

There were a few bright spots -- Heartbeat in seventh grade comes to mind, as well as some good conversations with youth leaders -- but those were the exceptions. Mostly, I collected compelling reasons not to trust people.

I didn't unlearn all of this mistrust until I started doing improv at Wheaton. I saw that if people trust one another, it's possible for them to be honest about their struggles, forgive one another's mistakes, and help one another grow.

---

This is another one of my favorite books.

You can buy it here. And you probably should.

Wells writes:

[One common] assumption is that improvisation is trivial and self-indulgent. This is perhaps because it is associated with humor and the ephemeral, and also because it can create intensely committed communities that seem united by no substantial goal, only the formal means of interacting. ... Underlying it is the assumption that Christian ethics is an intensely serious, somewhat earnest, and decidedly difficult discipline, weighing matters of daunting substance, and only to be entered reverently, soberly, and after serious thought. In this perspective, improvisation sounds suspiciously like a joke, an artifice -- an insult. Such a view risks being more solemn than God.

Throughout the Christian drama there is joy and playfulness. .. The church can afford to concentrate on details, because God has given her time to follow him. Taking time for the trivial is therefore a sign of faith, not foolishness. The church can afford to take the risk of the humorous and the ephemeral, because the joke is God's and the laughter is divine.

---

Some of my improv friends gave me rides to their church, where I found a community of people who don't seem to be pressuring me to have everything together or to agree with them about every tiny detail. They treat seasons of celebration and joy with as much importance as those of waiting and repentance. I learned that church didn't have to be as constantly traumatic as the churches I'd known. I've now been a member for more than five years.

I know I am amazingly blessed to be part of a church that values the differing gifts of its members, even if those gifts are in the arts. Our artists at Church of the Resurrection write music, yes, but also stage dramatic interpretations of scripture, paint altar pieces, and film comedic announcements. I love it all.

So when I wanted to teach an introductory improv class as a ministry through Rez, the church told me to go for it. I'm SO glad that five wonderful ladies decided to take a risk and play with me these past few weeks. I am not a preacher, nor do I have extraordinary gifts of healing or tongues or evangelism or any of those big impressive ones. But I know God has met me through play more than in any other way, and play is something I can teach.

How to Be a Jerk

2010-10-25T13:45:00.013-05:00

Dear fellow improvisers:

Are you having fun?

If you are not having fun, seriously consider the possibility that you are a jerk.*

If improv isn't fun, it probably has to do with judgment. You're judging other players, judging yourself, or judging your coach. Judgment is antithetical to acceptance, to YesAnd. In my head, this idea looks something like:

If you are the jerk in the troupe, not only are you sabotaging yourself, but you're making it hard for your friends to play with you and hard for your coach to direct you, and now nobody's having fun. Just like you. So congratulations.

The solution to not having fun is to have fun. That means showing up** and playing with your fellow artistic geniuses. Having fun doesn't mean everything will be easy, but who cares if it's easy if you're having fun?

Even if everyone else really is better than you, have fun. If you're having fun, nobody will notice your shortcomings, and you'll get better faster.

Even if one of your troupe members really is a black hole of comedy, have fun. If you support them anyway, you might be surprised. And even if you're not surprised, this scene is over in three minutes, so who cares?

Even if you think your coach is trying to ruin your life by turning your troupe into an extension of his own ego, have fun. Play hard despite your director having an off night or your coach asking you to exercise a muscle you don't feel like exercising.

I know these blue boxes well because I have been guilty of all of them at different times. When I was stuck in that orange box, it had less to do with improv and more to do with how sick and depressed I was at the time. Talking to my coaches about it helped.

If you're in that green box, can I come to your shows? Better yet, can I play with you?

*Credit to Derek, who got me started on this train of thought a few years ago when I overheard him say something like this to a surly workshop. Susan Messing and Rachel Mason both say things along the same lines, but they are less quotable for being rated R.

**Physical presence without emotional presence doesn't count.

The Chart

2010-10-24T00:02:00.000-05:00

This is The Chart.

Auden had sloppy penmanship.

Specifically, it's W. H. Auden's Romanticism chart. However, one of my literature professors at Wheaton called it The Chart with some amount of reverence, so that is how I think of it. (You can read a more legible PDF here.)

The basic idea of The Chart is that hell is getting what you think you want to an extreme degree. It is taking a good thing so far that it becomes an obsession. In the middle of the chart is balance, everything in its right place.

Another way of putting it is that one side of the chart wants Earth to return to being Eden/Arcadia, to return to nature and freedom; the other side wants Earth to hurry up and become Zion/Utopia. Neither extreme really lives in the present. Both take a good practice so far that it loses its context and becomes a bad practice.

Which, of course, makes me think of improv.

This is my improv extension of The Chart:

My ~~handwriting~~ typing is better than Auden's.

I find it helpful to check in once in awhile and notice where I'm defaulting in my scenes. For me, I find myself hanging out mostly on the left hand side of that chart, particularly when I'm tired or distracted. If I can be honest with myself about that, then I know what to work on.

If I notice I've been basically myself in every scene lately, it's time to be a character so totally different from me that she (or he) might not even be sane. Or if I've been defaulting to high status, it's time to try being varying degrees of low status characters for awhile. And, incidentally, I notice that if I've veered way to one side for a long time, I'm probably sabotaging myself by playing out of fear.

It's awesome if you have a director who can tell you honestly what he sees and guide or shove you out of your comfortable default. Unfortunately, I'm my own director at the moment, so I have to trust my gut and shake up my own playing. This works better some days than others.

---

If you have the patience to read a couple of poems, you can see Auden's application of this idea that we all tend toward one end of this spectrum in "Under Which Lyre" and in the Vespers section of "Horae Canonicae." I hope you do have the patience sometime -- those are two of my favorite poems in the world, though I suspect I only half-understand them.

The Elements of Style

2010-10-17T23:15:00.003-05:00

This is possibly my favorite book.

My friend Kevin gave me this illustrated edition for my birthday a few years ago.

The Elements of Style is a tiny book, mostly a list of rules about grammar and punctuation. It tells you the difference between further and farther, lie and lay, nauseous and nauseated, and that most crucial distinction between shall and will. It has lists of rules, such as:

12. Choose a suitable design and hold to it.

13. Make the paragraph the unit of composition.

14. Use the active voice.

15. Put statements in positive form.

16. Use definite, specific, concrete language.

17. Omit needless words.

I go back to this book every few months, whether or not I'm writing anything at the time. I tend to pick it up when I'm mired in some kind of unfinishable project, when I am too overwhelmed with life to begin reading a novel or too unfocused to read poetry. (It was the only book I could even pick up after my friend Stephen died, suddenly and far away, over three years ago now. I read it over and over, because it was small and concrete and certain, and life was big and vague and confused.)

Each of Strunk and White's rules is followed by examples of good writing that follows the rules and bad writing that doesn't. Sometimes, though, our heroes deviate from the plain examples to explain why the rule is important to the world. Here is one of my favorite passages in the entire book:

Muddiness is not merely a disturber of prose, it is also a destroyer of life, of hope: death on the highway caused by a badly worded road sign, heartbreak among lovers caused by a misplaced phrase in a well-intentioned letter, anguish of a traveler expected to be met at a railway station and not being met because of a slipshod telegram. Think of the tragedies that are rooted in ambiguity, and be clear! When you say something, make sure you have said it. The chances of your having said it are only fair.

The illustrator of the most beautiful edition of The Elements of Style is Maira Kalman, who is proof that I am not the only one fixated on this book. She has also made a short film based on her illustrations, which I stumbled upon via The Kitchn:

And here is Maira Kalman talking about her life and art. She talks about The Elements of Style about 8 minutes into the talk.

Her illustrations look like the inside of my brain.

Cake! Caaake!

2010-10-15T00:00:00.005-05:00

A dear friend of mine sent me a link to this post by Hyperbole and a Half, which chronicles our hero Allie's psychological meltdown when she can't have cake.

I felt this way about improv in the year after graduation. Rather, I would have felt this way if I hadn't been too sick to do stand up without passing out for those first few months. After that was over, though, I had crazy, get-out-of-my-way improv withdrawal.

Improv is my cake. Cake is also my cake. The following is improv nerdiness, interspersed with cakes!

Lauren and I made this for a friend's birthday. My mom probably helped with the icing.

I've used baking as a metaphor for improv when people in my workshops ask me why their scenes aren't working even though they're working hard on accepting, heightening, making strong offers, what have you. It's because that's not improv, really; those are just tools to help your improv be less sloppy.

If improv were a cake, technique would be the wooden spoon and mixing bowl and spatula. It'd be really messy to make a cake without those things. But if all you have is a really great bowl and spoon and spatula, you'll still go hungry. At least, hungry for cake.

Time would be the oven, the form would be the cake pan. Cupcakes have the potential to be as delicious as bundt cakes, layer cakes, or crazy sculpted cakes; short form can be as fun as Harold and Armando. They're different shapes in which to pour your awesome scene work.

I made this cake for my friend Meredith, who is a vegetarian.

There is no definitive list of what to put in a cake to make it a good cake, just some general guidelines. Most cakes have some combination of eggs and flour and sugar and milk. Some have cream cheese or carrots or cocoa; some are vegan or gluten-free. It's a lot of stuff that wouldn't necessarily taste good on its own but works in combination with the other flavors to make something new. There's flexibility there, as long as you keep your proportions reasonable and your ingredients are good quality.

Most scenes have some basic ingredients, too: relationship, character, environment, game, and probably more I can't think of. Or fewer, depending on the kind of scene.

If your milk's gone rancid or your sugar has ants, your cake will be awful. Your cake pan and egg beaters might have been fine, but that doesn't save your cake. There's no sense investing in an expensive Kitchen-Aide mixer if you're not going to bother with your ingredients and proportions.

And once in awhile, for some inexplicable reason, a cake with all those great ingredients still doesn't turn out the way it's supposed to, and you can't always know why. You just have to double-check your ingredients, clean up your tools, and try again.

My mom probably did not help with this icing. This is all me.

FURTHERMORE. You don't have to have icing for a good cake. In fact, bad icing will ruin an otherwise good cake, and good icing won't save a gross cake. If I have to chose between a cake with bad icing and a cake with no icing, I'll pick no icing.

And I'll take a good, interesting scene that doesn't me laugh over a weak scene dripping with gags. Even good icing doesn't make up for bad cake, and funny jokes don't make up for shoddy scene work.

Truth: Icing is my favorite part of cake. But it gives me a stomach ache to eat it by itself. Good icing on good cake, though? Life doesn't get better. I mean, improv doesn't get any better. That distinction keeps blurring these days.

I wonder if the same could be said for many art forms, like writing and painting. Technique helps so much. But if there's not something the technique is serving, if its for its own sake, then you have some lovely shiny clean dishes and nothing to eat.


This is from when my mom pretended it was my birthday so my friends would come over and watch Schindler's List.

Fear, Failure and Feathers

2010-10-12T23:09:00.002-05:00

Here is the picture from my elementary school history book that made me afraid of being tarred and feathered.

I thought it might happen to me on accident if I walked on our road too soon after new asphalt had been poured. I don't know where I thought the feathers would come from, though. Or the colonists.

(Other childhood fears included: scorpions, letting my feet touch the floor if the lights were out,* and the witch from "The Three Little Pigs."**)

I've been thinking about fear because of improv. I've heard that fear of public speaking is almost as common as fear of death. Several people lately have told me that they can't imagine trying improv, that they would be so afraid that they would throw up or pass out.

I want to tell them that a very good improviser I know has been known to throw up before shows. And I've passed out at key moments in plenty of practices, including practices I was directing.*** Improvisers aren't fearless people but people who choose not to let that fear keep them from playing.

However, we do let that fear drive us away from playing our best.

The common things improvisers are afraid of include: Not being funny enough, looking ridiculous, having too much responsibility, having no control. Really, those are all manifestations of the fears of being hurt and alone.

If I don't control this situation, it might go somewhere awful. And if it goes somewhere awful, it will look like my fault. And if it's my fault, other people won't want to play with me anymore. And if nobody wants to play with me anymore, I will be alone, and it will hurt. Therefore I must control all scenes and games or I will be alone. Probably forever.

When you actually write it out or say it out loud, you can see how irrational it is.

I think the best thing for me, and probably the best thing for many of my improv friends, was to experience undeniable failure.

I didn't control the scene, and it DID go somewhere awful! I knew it I knew it!

And then to realize that that's as far as it went. We moved onto the next scene after that, or we shook off that horrible performance and showed up ready for practice the next week. None of the other scary hurt-and-alone-in-the-dark things really happen after failure. Ok, so there's tar on your shoes. Acknowledged. But where did you think those feathers were going to come from again?

---

*This was somewhat to do with scorpions, which were a real threat in my house, but mostly it had to do with that there might be some tar on the floor and I might accidentally step in it and get sucked in and be tarred and feathered.

** I know. There is actually no witch in "The Three Little Pigs." A wolf, yes. But no witch. I still had nightmares about that witch, though.

***Anemia + abject panic = fainting.

TGITMOHSN

2010-10-05T23:17:00.004-05:00

This is my friend Duke.

"I have faced existentialism and bitten my thumb at it."

Throughout college, Duke gathered friends and strangers around him for movie nights, often referred to with one of the following handy acronyms:

TGIBF (Thank God It's Brazil Friday, in which we did not watch more than ten minutes of Brazil every week before we changed our minds and picked another movie)

TGIBFBF (Thank God It's Boys From Brazil Friday, in which we similarly did not watch more than ten minutes of Boys from Brazil)

TGINMOPIN (Thank God It's Not My Own Private Idaho Night, in which, as rumor has it, they watched way too much of My Own Private Idaho)

After our cursory scans of the theme movie, the actual movies we watched ranged from popular to obscure, but usually more on the obscure side. Many weren't in English. Some turned out to be great movies, like Secret Sunshine and Tokyo Godfathers. Others turned out to be abusive, like Carnivale, or laughably horrible, like Zardoz. Some were too baffling to categorize, like Wool 100%. We didn't know what to expect, but we knew it wouldn't be run-of-the-mill. No summer blockbusters here.

---

These days, Duke is teaching English classes in Laos. We miss Duke. Besides missing him for his own sake, I've also noticed that my friends get together less frequently when he's not here. That combined with my new living alone situation, I see less of my friends than I would like.

So when Steve asked if I would open my apartment to a movie night, I said of course! Friends! Come over!

Steve paused the movie before it began and said, "I want to introduce this by saying that there's no good way to introduce it, just that Duke says it's important, so here's The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya."

That is how, even with Duke out of the hemisphere, I found myself watching an alienating anime, which I did not enjoy much, but which I kept watching because Duke wanted it. And I hung out with friends I don't see as often these days, because Duke wanted them to see the show, too.

So kudos to Duke, the only guy I know who can orchestrate a Wheaton movie night from Southeast Asia.

The discovery never seems to stop.

2010-10-01T00:34:00.003-05:00

This is my friend Steve.

"Everyone stop asking me to do things I like!"

Not long ago, I borrowed Steve's computer for a few minutes to show him a video clip. In the short time we were on Hulu searching for the clip, we had to sit through two different birth control commercials, as well as repeat screenings of a disturbing, Lisa Frank-style cat commercial. Each time Hulu asked if these ads were relevant to me (read: relevant to Steve's computer) I clicked "Yes."

If you ever use Steve's computer, I implore you to follow suit. I dream of a world in which Steve is so bombarded with Yaz and Friskies ads that he writes unpleasant things on helium balloons and releases them over a field of ostrich-legged turkeys.

Good luck, and we're all counting on you.

Fear Not

2010-09-24T10:47:00.003-05:00

When I was in elementary school, I was in a church Christmas play called Three Wise Men and a Baby. It starred our choir director as a bear and is a little hard to explain in words.

I'm the one who brings the myrrh.

Right now, though, I'm thinking about the shepherds.

The angel comes to the shepherds in the field, keeping watch over their flocks by night. (Tangent: That participial phrase, "keeping ... night," placed after the word "field," should techinically mean that the fields were keeping watch. I'd never noticed that until I typed it out just now.) Anyway, the dialogue goes something like this:

Angel: Fear not.
Shepherds: AHHH!
Angel: I said, "Fear not."
Shepherds: AAAHHH!
Angel: What part of "fear not" are you not understanding? Nevermind. Listen up.

---

I've offered to teach an improv class for women at my church. We're not planning to take over the city or anything, just give people an introduction. We decided to start with just women, because for some reason it's harder to get women to play, so we thought an all-female environment would feel safer.

The announcement in the bulletin read:

Improvisational comedy workshop for women
Don't be scared: Improvisation is not about being original or clever. It's about working together with a group to create something beautiful and true (and often very silly). This is a great chance to stretch your creativity and to connect with other women at Rez in a lighthearted environment. Come play with us!

I heard a lot of enthusiasm, along the lines of "I'm so glad you're doing that! This will be so good for building community among different ages of women who don't normally spend much time together, and we have so much creativity in this church." The next sentence was inevitably, "But I'm too scared to come."

Hey, I said, "Fear not." What part of "fear not" are you not understanding?

Over the past few weeks, I've been following up with those ladies who liked the idea but didn't see themselves being brave enough to try. I explained that this is going to be a relaxed class, like recess for grown-ups. Some have decided to give it a go. We'll begin next week.

Ten Words or Less

2010-09-09T23:03:00.002-05:00

Last night, I was asked to describe my summer in 10 words. I condensed it to 9.

Fired
Volunteered
Bridesmaid-ed
Hired
Hired
Hired
Moved
Left
Hired

Explicated, this would be:

Fired from Web Works. Something to do with my not wanting to manage (read: lie about) the reputation of our big clients, who wanted me to make them appear honest and reliable. (My favorite part of that was when they asked me to bury the scandal that had aired the night before on Frontline. Seriously? You want to pretend a PBS documentary never happened?) I questioned the ethics of this, and I learned not to ask a marketing company about ethics.

Volunteered at my church's office, which is a great way to get to know people at church and add structure to a month of unemployment.

Bridesmaid-ed at my little brother's wedding, which was decked out in Alice in Wonderland-style black and white, red and turquoise. Blade and I and a few other friends helped decorate and run errands. I saw people at that wedding that I hadn't really planned on seeing again after middle school. It was surreal. Thomas and Amanda are now married and living in Arizona. We like her. He's ok, too.

Hired at the local zoo for a few hours a week. There was no convincing my mom that this was not a lion tamer job. This zoo doesn't have lions. It has deer and rabbits. It's mostly a farmyard. My job was supposed to be to tell people that their beloved zoo, which was free, is no longer free, would you like a receipt? But before I started work, I got ...

Hired at an Honey, an organic restaurant down the road from my apartment. It was friendlier and offered better hours than the zoo, so I took it instead. I waited tables and learned to make espresso drinks. It was a lot of hours at first, sometimes breakfast, sometimes supper, but then I got ...

Hired as an administrative assistant at Russian Ministries. Ah, a real job. Yes, it's a lot of filing and data entry, but there's a point to even the most tedious parts. Lately, I'm processing donations, some of which will be directed to help families in the Ukraine adopt local orphans, and others will go to training programs to equip pastors and lay leaders in the former Soviet Union. You don't get much pointier than that.

Moved into a new apartment. My lovely roommate's company transferred her, so I needed to find a single bedroom place for myself. Now I'm in a surprisingly cheerful basement apartment directly underneath my fellow Russian Ministries administrative assistant's house. My parents came up for a few days to help me settle in and make the place feel homey.

Left Honey. Once I started at Russian Ministries, I couldn't wait tables during breakfast or lunch anymore, but the restaurant's owner didn't have many evening hours to give me. When she said those hours wouldn't pick up, I left to find something more stable. Within two hours of my leaving Honey, I got ...

Hired by a local family whose three children need to be driven around after school before their parents get off work. I'm getting a tiny taste of what it must be like to be a soccer mom. More specifically, a soccer-lacrosse-5K mom. (Seriously, have you ever heard of a 9 year old training for a 5K?)

I've got one word left to use, so, um:

BakedCrochetedWatchedmoviesReadbooksSpenttimewithfriendsHadabirthday

---

Let this be a warning, said the magpie to the morning
Don't let this fading summer pass you by

It's a job! It's a job!

2010-03-30T16:12:00.000-05:00

Since graduation in May, I've had a seasonal job, a part time job, and several short-term gigs, but never a full time position.

Applying for jobs is time consuming. Most days, I spent several hours filling out applications, researching companies, and sifting through ads to avoid scams and pyramid schemes. I have record of having applied for over 200 positions, but I didn't keep a record of anything I applied for through staffing agencies, which don't reveal the name of the company unless they get you an interview. It's probably closer to 250.

To keep from going stir crazy while un/deremployed, I have:

Held two internships, one as a writer at MAI and one as an administrative assistant/courier at World Relief
Helped Church of the Resurrection's office with miscellanious preparing-for-Easter chores
Sang in Rez's choir
Taught two semester-long improv workshops
Joined a Bible study
Weaned completely off of medicine I didn't need anymore, and consequently slept a lot
Radically changed my diet to accomodate a newly-discovered dairy allergy
Read a zillion books (a random sampling of which would include Les Misérables, After Virtue, Oryx and Crake, and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.)
Got hooked on The West Wing, even the not-as-good seasons
Learned to crochet

Staying busy helped keep me from becoming resigned to un/deremployment, and that will make it an easier transition when I start my new full time job this week.

I'm the newest web coordinator for Web Works, which means I will write copy for small businesses, churches, politicians -- anyone who needs to set up a website.

I start on Thursday. I like to think of it as Maundy Thursday, though I keep being reminded that it's also April Fool's Day.

---

If you're in the Chicago area, come to Edman Chapel (on Wheaton's campus, though this is not a function of the college) on Saturday at 7 for Rez's Easter Vigil.

Besides singing in the choir, I'm in the Red Sea reading, which means I'm an Israelite, then an Egyptian, then an Israelite again, then an Egyptian again, and then (spoiler) I die. There are drums. Come and see!

A new plan

2010-01-11T17:02:00.005-06:00

The hunt for a full-time job continues, and I would like to switch strategies.

Do you have a job you would like to offer me? If so, email me a job description, including hours, starting salary, and why I won't feel like I'm wasting my time and energy and bachelor's degree at your workplace. Then I will interview you, and I will expect you to impress me despite your nerves.

If I am not impressed, I may or may not give you the courtesy of a rejection letter. I might just string you along for awhile, just to see you jump every time your phone rings during business hours.

---

Also, The Pub, a Wheaton College magazine I wrote for a time or two, has a blog now.

On this blog is an essay I wrote about Shakespeare and liturgy and an article I helped a friend edit and revise.

It does not do a body good.

2009-10-06T12:11:00.011-05:00

"You're not sick, you're just a person," says John Campbell. I had always taken this for granted, that being sick and tired and unfocused was part of being a person, especially a person recovering from college and a couple of years on an antidepressant. Apparently, though, lethargy, lack of focus, and depression are part of being allergic to milk.

My new doctor, an osteopath, has me hold allergens or touch pressure points while he plays a game Blade and I like to call "Flops or Not Flops" (F/NF). If the doctor pushes on my leg and I'm able to resist, then whatever allergen or pressure point I'm touching isn't a problem for me. But if it makes my leg flop down on the table, he runs more related tests to narrow down the problem. Using the patented F/NF method, Dr. Gelband of Naperville determined that my chief problem (besides being overmedicated) was milk. I'm allergic to milk. Apparently, I've been allergic to milk for a long time, but I've never been tested for it, because I didn't notice my stomach hurting.

Dr. Gelband backed up his F/NF New Age feel-goodery with a conventional x-ray. Behind my ribs, I could see what looked like an extra, coiled up bone. "That's food," Dr. Gelband told me. It was food in my intestine that had calcified. Because of milk. It wasn't necessarily making my stomach hurt, but it was keeping me from getting energy from any of my food.

Unlike someone who is lactose intolerant, I can't just take a pill with an enzyme to make it better. I just have to avoid dairy. I'm learning that we make most things with milk. Frozen vegetables or chicken are often injected with butter. Whey is in things like cookies; casein is sometimes used as a filler in over-the-counter drugs and tends to creep into all kinds of seemingly innocent foods, like soy cheese.

However, also unlike someone who is lactose intolerant, I am able to eat dairy-ish things, as long as they come from goat or sheep milk, like feta cheese. And I can eat some kinds of yogurt, as long as they have live cultures. I can even have some kinds of well-aged cheese, like Romano.

The safest foods are the ones marked vegan or parve. I can consistently eat Asian food, since most Asian food doesn't use milk at all. (When's the last time you had Chinese food with cheese or butter?) My doctor said, though, to be wary of Asian food places that are owned by Americans, because they might have changed the recipes and added milk to the soups and sauces. I eat a lot of fried rice, egg rolls, and extra-dark chocolate with almond milk, so that is nothing to complain about.

Almond milk and soy ice cream are delicious. This has not stopped me from having stress dreams about Dairy Queen.

---

'Cause calcium is deadly
But tender to the tooth
And it's one sure-fire way to know
If you're MX missile-proof
Or if you're just aloof.

It's a job. It's a job.

2009-10-01T09:53:00.006-05:00

Since graduation, I have only been unemployed for a total of one month. In fact, I am on four separate payrolls right now.

1. Teas and Toes, Glen Ellyn

I brew loose leaf tea and get to drink any leftover samples. I'm learning a lot about the health benefits of loose leaf tea, as well as the different sensitivities of different varieties. That accounts for the "Teas" part. The "Toes" part means that I prepare foot soaks -- hot river stones, deep copper bowls, detoxifying foot soaks, aroma therapeutic salts, rose petals -- and then clean up after the client has left. I also do a lot of explanations about the differences between a pedicure or traditional foot massage and a reflexology treatment. The best part is sitting in a zero-gravity chair.

2. Christian Youth Theater, DuPage

I teach the Advanced Improv class to 12-18 year olds. (In my class, it's more like 12-16 year olds.) Teaching middle and high school students is a whole different ballgame than teaching college students. Younger students are more likely to feel paralyzed by their peers' preconceptions and expectations. College freshmen and transfers still have that new-start feeling and don't think they've got each other pigeon holed before practice even starts. That accounts for some of it. But the CYT kids continually surprise me with fun character choices, and it makes me itchy to find a place to play again.

3. The Reading Tree, Downers Grove

Unlike the above jobs, this one does not have a regular, weekly schedule. The Reading Tree initially hired me to teach a sentence diagramming course, sort of a grammar boot camp, for kids transferring from public to private schools. They've kept me on their list of tutors and call me when they need someone to tutor a student in phonics, grammar, literature, or reading comprehension. This will get busier, I predict, after report cards come out and kids are threatened with groundings if they don't get those grades up.

4. Bundles of Books and Gifts, Glen Ellyn

This feels like volunteer work, but it's great. Basically, I categorize and shelve used books for a few hours per week. In return, I get store credit. That adds up to several free books every week. I spend most of my shelving time working on the mystery section and romance section, which seem to collect the most donations. I entertain myself by holding a contest (in my head) for most ridiculous title. The winner so far? Highland Vampire, a Harlequin(ish) romance. It's actually in it's second or third printing right now. The mind reels.

It rather feels like my fifth job is getting healthy. Lately, I'm at the doctor about three times a week on average. But that's another post.

We're all just taller children.

2009-08-07T12:05:00.006-05:00

Meredith and I are in the process of moving to an apartment in Glen Ellyn. This is the first time I've ever had to sign a formal lease, complete with a realtor, credit checks, and proof of employment. That last bit is up to Meredith, since I'm on the job hunt.

My full time tutoring job in Oak Park is over. Now that I'm not spending 8 hours a day raising my voice to get the attention of ADD* kids, I've notice Frederick has moved out. (Frederick was the headache who moved into the back of my brain for about four weeks. It would be impolite not to name a pet who stays around for so long.) I can't say I miss Frederick.

I didn't realize how much it was all getting to me: asking the same question over and over without a response, searching the bathrooms and closets for hiding children, trying to hold off tantrums over everything from the sound "oi" makes to untied shoelaces. (There's no telling what will set off an OCD kid.)

For the moment, I'm a "coach" at a "grammar camp" at The Reading Tree. This means I teach a couple of kids to diagram sentences for two hours a day. I keep being amazed at simple things -- these kids answer questions when I ask. They make eye contact. They laugh at jokes. They make me feel sane. I want to give them hugs. But, since I've had training and experience with more severe kids, I'm valuable to the company. If they get a dyslexic or Autistic kid, I'm the one they'll call, and that will give me more clients.

I'm still looking for some kind of stable job, though, whether part or full time. But not this weekend. This weekend, I'm moving to a grown-up apartment with Meredith.

*I do not use the terms ADD or OCD lightly. These are kids who try so hard but can't pay attention, or who are so compulsive that they will wash their hands raw. The Oak Park kids were all either ADD, Autistic, dyslexic, or otherwise developmentally behind. I noticed several of them were adopted at the age of 4 or 5, meaning that, while other kids were learning their alphabet and basic problem solving skills, these kids were bouncing from one foster home or orphanage to another. That said, when one boy on the Autism spectrum throws a tantrum, the other spectrum kids get upset, and the ADD kids can't pay attention. Frederick didn't like it, either.

---

You're the same as you started
You just jump a little higher

You will be hearing from us shortly

2009-07-13T22:57:00.004-05:00

Because of a Lindamood-Bell scheduling fluke, I have tomorrow (Tuesday) off. And because Lindamood-Bell is a seasonal job, I am spending tonight and tomorrow applying for more permanent jobs. So is my roommate. It makes us punchy.

I have applied to charter schools and coffee shops, children's museums and publishing houses, over 55 in all since I started sending out my resume in March. Dr. Gauthier said at church yesterday that searching for a job causes the same amount of stress in your body as the death of a family member. I am starting to believe him.

---

You feel adequate to the demands of this position?
What qualities to you feel you
Personally have to offer?

Let us consider your application form.
Your qualifications, though impressive, are
Not, we must admit, precisely what
We had in mind. Would you care
To defend your relevance?

Indeed

Now your age. Perhaps you feel able
To make your own comment about that,
Too? We are conscious ourselves
Of the need for a candidate with precisely
The right degree of immaturity.

So glad we agree

And now a delicate matter: your looks.
You do appreciate this work involves
Contact with the actual public? Might they,
Perhaps, find your appearance
Disturbing?

Quite so

And your accent. That is the way
You have always spoken, is it? What
Of your education? Were
You educated? We mean, of course,
Where were you educated?
And how
Much of a handicap is that to you,
Would you say?
Married, children,
We see. The usual dubious
Desire to perpetuate what had better
Not have happened at all. We do not
Ask what domestic disasters shimmer
Behind that vaguely unsuitable address.

And where you born -- ?

Yes. Pity.

So glad we agree.

- U. A. Fanthorpe

We create the magic of learning.

2009-07-04T10:35:00.017-05:00

These are magic stones. They are plastic and shiny and cheap, and kids covet them. We use them at work to buy students' cooperation.

I'm working for the summer at a tutoring center. I work with eight students a day for one hour each. My youngest kid has been 8; my oldest thus far has been 17.

Most of the students are used to failure and have self-esteem problems. Part of my job is to keep that frustration away by using "positive error handling technique," which is a cross between improv's "Yes, And" principle and the Socratic method. Basically, when a kid gives a wrong answer, I'm supposed to affirm something about her response. Then, instead of telling her the answer, I'm supposed to help her figure it out for herself, then shower her with praise (in the form of stones) when she gets the answer right.

That works 80%, and it keeps morale up. But a few times a day, this error handling technique leads to one of the following sorts of conversations.

"George" is 14 years old. He has Autism, which means that he can read and remember words but can't necessarily picture what they mean.

Me: "The girl ran through the tall grass." What do those words make you picture?

George: The girl ran through the tall grass.

Me: Great! Those were the words. Now tell me what that made you picture in your head.

George: The girl ran through the tall grass.

Me: Yes, she did. What do you picture for the girl?

George: Ran through the tall grass.

Me: Yes, that's what she's doing. What does she look like?

George: The girl ran through the tall grass.

Me: Is the girl tall or short?

George: Tall grass.

Me: The grass is tall. You're right. What about the girl?

George: The girl ran through the tall grass.

More often, though, George just doesn't answer me, and I find myself wondering if I've turned mute or invisible, or maybe have just asked such an idiotic question that I'm not worth answering. After all, I'm repeating myself over and over, too, and we could be stuck in this perfect echolalial circle forever.

"John" is 12, athletic, and goofy. He spent pre-school through first grade in and out of the hospital for multiple heart surgeries, so he never caught on to phonics, much less reading.

<I hold up an "oi" flashcard.>

Me: What do these letters say?

John: "Aw."

Me: Oh, good, I did see vowels. When you say "aw," what's the first letter you picture?

John: W.

Me: Great! I did see a W in "aw." Did you see anything before the W?

John: O.

Me: You're right that there was another vowel before the W. What would O-W say?

John: "oi."

Me: Yeah, I definitely pictured an O in "oi." What's the second letter you picture in "oi"?

John: H.

Me: H is a letter, you're right. Let's look at the card again.

John: Ee.

Me: I would hear a little "ee" sound in there at the end. How would you say the whole thing?

John: I!

Me: Oh! I did see an I in there. Did you see it coming first or last?

John: In the middle.

Me: Um, ok. This actually says oi.

John: That's what I said!

Me: You did say parts of it, you're right. Touch the card and say it again.

John: Oi.

Me: GREAT! Give me a high five! You got it! Let's see how fast we can do the next ones, ok?

<I hold up F, Qu, Ee, Ll, and Oi, to see if he can remember Oi when he's not thinking so hard.>

John: Fff! Qua! Ee! Lll! Ooo!

Me: You got those first several perfectly! Let's look at this last one. What's that second letter?

John: I.

Me: Awesome! So what do O and I say when they're together?

John: Aw.

He is so insistent that I wonder if I need my glasses prescription updated, or if I actually remember what O and I say together. That particular curriculum is called Seeing Stars, which is what I do after an hour of desperately blurting out anything positive I can say.

Those are my two most severe kids so far. The others correct themselves pretty easily, they respond to questions, they read Frog and Toad Are Friends with me, and, best of all, they are easily bribed with magic stones. As a temporary job, it definitely beats data entry. At the end of the summer, though, the kids will head back to regular school, and I could be unemployed again.

I may attach baggies of magic stones to my application cover letters from now on.

Well, in this economy ...

2009-05-16T00:39:00.004-05:00

I have followed Career Service's advice this semester and applied for jobs. Lots of jobs. Over 50 at this point, everything Monster, CareerBuilder and Craigslist could give me for the Chicago Area. I've sent my resume everywhere from the American Girl Place to the American Nuclear Society.

Last week, I got an email asking for a phone interview about a comedy writing position. I'll call the interviewer "Gary." I was slightly suspicious to begin with, since Googling the nonsense words in Gary's email signature pulled up an inordinant number of furry event calendars. I didn't want to jump to conclusions, but I did spend most of the following conversation trying hard to avoid imagining Gary in a fox costume.

Me: What kind of comedy writers are you looking for?

Gary: Funny ones.

Me: Right. What kind, though? Stage? Screen? Sketch?

Gary: Screen. We're working on a sitcom.

Me: What's the premise?

Gary: I can't tell you a lot, since it hasn't come out yet, and there are intellectual property laws. I can tell you it's about an oddly matched set of roommates.

My head: Like Friends or Gilligan's Island or Laverne and Shirley or the Odd Couple or Three's Company or Will and Grace or ... or ... or ...

Me: What level of content are you looking for?

Gary: Dense. Juicy. More Simpsons than Family Guy.

Me: How will it be rated?

Gary: Highly, I hope. We're shooting for a big audience.

Me: I guess I'm trying to find out what your target audience is. What kind of comedy is this?

Gary: Why do you care? Is there any kind of comedy you won't write?

Me: Well, I'm a Christian, so there are some boundaries I'll want to respect.

Gary: We are into pushing boundaries here. Why don't you come by the office, and we'll see if you're a good match for our team. Is this weekend good?

Me: Would next week work? I'm graduating from college this weekend.

Gary: Congratulations! What college?

Me: Wheaton College.

Gary: Oh. So the Christian thing ... that wasn't a joke?

Me: No.

Gary: You're serious?

Me: Yes.

Gary: Christians make me want to gouge out my own eyes.

Me: Ok.

Gary: Also, you might as well know, this sitcom is going to be mostly NC17/X. A Wheaton graduate wouldn't be a good fit for us.

Me: Probably not. Thanks for your time.

That is one for the Career Services webpage.

I'm glad he told me he was looking for comedic porn (pornographic comedy?) writers before I took a trip into the city to interview in person.

And so job search continues.

And I didn't know this, either.

2009-05-01T14:02:00.003-05:00

I submitted a collage to Kodon to see what an art rejection letter looked like.

I didn't find out. Instead, I got published.* It has been four years now, and I do not suppose I will ever understand Wheaton College.

Title: Bird watching
Medium: Christianity Today, Vogue, packing tape

*My writing, on the other hand, was rejected entirely, including the poem from the previous post.

And I didn't know it.

2009-04-28T00:11:00.004-05:00

As is customary for a self-respecting writing major, I entered Wheaton's Lowell-Grabel creative writing contest. This year's judge was Wheaton alumna and religion journalist Cathleen Falsani, whose book Sin Boldly I read recently and whose blog I have found well worth stalking. She was beyond encouraging at the awards ceremony.

Duke was awarded first place in creative nonfiction and third place in fiction. I was awarded second place in creative nonfiction and -- get this -- first place in poetry.

Yeah. Poetry. I know.

The poem is about when my family joined Highland Terrace when I was 14 and sulky.

---

One Baptism: A Sestina

I was baptized in the name
of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit
with my father, mother and brother
by a preacher dressed like a fisherman
to keep himself from getting wet.
I was dunked into the heated baptistery

lit by a stained glass dove glowing neon above the baptistery.
The preacher, the Brother, often forgot my name
and, whether because we were related by Spirit
or just out of habit, called me Brother,
forgetting not every Baptist is a man.
He himself refused to get wet,

guarded against getting wet
by wearing rubber pants in the baptistery
under the neon stained glass dove named
(or just symbolic of) the Holy Spirit.
I do not remember how my brother
felt about this preacher, this man

who wanted my dad baptized as a man
because getting his baby head sprinkled wet
by Methodists didn’t count. The chlorinated baptistery,
heated from below and lit from above, named
us as church-members. The spirit
of the thing was lost on my soggy little brother

and my skeptical self. I acknowledge one brother
(who now is grown, practically a man)
as mine, not this preacher, wet
with sweat and sermon spit -- not baptistery
water -- from getting carried away in the Lord’s name,
and I am certainly not his brother, even in spirit.

Was it the same neon stained dove Spirit
shining over my parents and brother
and me who hovered over God-made-Man,
the Man who volunteered to get wet
in his cousin’s muddy makeshift baptistery,
cold with slime and fish, and heard his name?

This brother-man in the baptistery would not get wet, even in the name of the spirit.

*Blade and Steve should be given some of this credit, since they have endured more than their share of Duke's and my rough drafts.

Healing

2009-04-22T09:08:00.000-05:00

An excerpt from an essay I'm working on concerning the seven sacraments.

-------

Your new dentist asked you how long your mouth had been full of ulcers.

Oh, always.

She diagnosed you with an allergy to a chemical found in most regular and whitening toothpastes. She did not need to write a prescription, but she did recommend that you switch to toothpaste for sensitive teeth.

That’s all?

That’s all.

After a few days, it no longer hurt to eat. Within a week, you were able to drink orange juice or salt your eggs without so much as a wince.

Your new dentist warned you never to use the old toothpaste again, not even a little, not even if it’s the only convenient toothpaste around. That would be like touching only a little poison ivy.

You didn’t need to be told twice.

You couldn’t believe you’d never thought to ask your old dentist why your mouth hurt all the time. You assumed it was supposed to hurt. Was all healing that simple? Were you really not supposed to hurt all the time? Was asking all it took?

"Who do you say that I am?"

2009-03-02T00:04:00.006-06:00

Jim Young, the founder of Wheaton's Arena Theater, used to say, "I keep finding Jesus in places I thought he had no business being." Arena continues the tradition of looking for God in unlikely places in a class called Church and Theater.

The thesis: Theater asks questions, and the church provides a safe, nurturing context in which to wrestle with those questions. So how do we go about asking those questions in artistic ways that point people toward God?

Christians, especially Christians in the arts, cannot ignore the media's portrayal of Jesus. We have to trust that our faith is solid enough to stand being rattled around some. The first half of the semester, then, is about who our culture says Jesus is. This translates into our watching a lot of heretical movies.

---

Yiimimangaliso: The Mysteries
In the tradition of medieval mystery plays, Yiimimangaliso hits the high points of the redemption story from creation to Pentacost. The company is from South African.

The story of God's relationship with humanity is told mostly through percussion and dance, with smatterings of English, Afrikaans, Zulu and Xhosa. Angels wear chicken feathers. Adam and Eve are completely nude. Lucifer wears red pleather. Noah's flood mostly uses a watering can, and Jesus' entire childhood is depicted in a short, rhythmic game.

The only thing I can picture being offensive (unless you find dance in church offensive) is the occasional resemblance to minstrel shows. The company, though, is South African, not African American, so I don't know their familiarity with minstrelsy.

---

Leonard Bernstein's Mass
Unlike the other pieces we've talked about together, Bernstein's not-exactly-a-musical-and-not-quite-an-opera-and-certainly-not-a-straight-Mass is the only one that does not portray Jesus explicitly. The Celebrant and choir sing the traditional Latin text for the Mass, and they are interrupted periodically by parishioners voicing their doubts and demands. The chaos eventually takes its toll on the Celebrant (pastor). The congregation turns on him and demands he fix their lives. He eventually burns out, drops the chalice, and notices for the first time that red wine isn't red at all, but sort of brown and blue. He also rhymes "Adonai" with "I don't know," which gets him major points in my nerdy writing major book.

Some Wheaton friends accuse me of cynicism about the church, but I grew up in Greenville, Texas. Specifically, I grew up in Aldersgate (nondenominational) and then Highland Terrace (Southern Baptist), which gives me a juicy background of having some pastors being run off and other pastors running off on their own, all while their congregations squabble over nothing in particular. Bernstein's Mass portrays the church not as it should be but as it often is -- rich in history and truth but filled with people who are sometimes actively destructive, sometimes hypocritical, sometimes quietly struggling, and pastors aren't immune.

I have listened to the soundtrack on my own at least five times since we heard it in class.

---

Chocolate Jesus
Cosimo Cavallaro exhibited his anatomically correct sculpture of Jesus during Holy Week 2007. It is entirely chocolate. We could neither confirm nor deny Cavallaro's interest in Tom Waits' Mule Variations.

I am less offended by this now that Walgreens has their Easter candy out. There are chocolate crosses right there next to the bunnies and eggs. They are four dollars. I am much more offended by those than by the Cavallaro sculpture. We are supposed to eat the body of Christ, though it is usually somewhat healthier -- a torn piece of bread or an oyster cracker.

There is nothing cute about this Cavallaro's Jesus. He is naked and in pain. The crosses at Walgreens were adorable enough to make you forget they were instruments of torture. Nobody eats chocolate electric chairs or even chocolate guns.

---

Jesus of Montreal
It's 1988, and a Canadian bishop asks a young director to revamp the parish's decades-old passion play. The director gathers actors -- some with more experience in beer commercials than any other venue -- and revamps not only the presentation of the Passion story but also the entire script, incorporating recent archeological digs in the Palestine and soliloquys from Hamlet. The Catholic church is not pleased.

As the film goes on, the actors get their own identities entangled with their characters, and the movie becomes allegorical. The actors are disciples. The director is Jesus. A slick lawyer is Satan. A film studio is the temple. Art is religion.

That last bit is where I have the hiccough: It seems like art turns into a replacement religion somewhere along the way. That, as well as a few stray comments about everyone finding their own seperate paths to salvation, is probably why the movie was considered so offensive. Unless I missed something, which is possible, since the movie was in French and subtitles don't always cut it.

Oh, and crucifixion is crucifixion, and ____ ______ is resurrection. I won't ruin it for you; see the movie.

---

But I am about to ruin another movie, because neither its craft nor its theology earn it a recommendation.

The Last Temptation of Christ
I once heard a speaker at a youth camp say that, ever since this movie came out, he's boycotted everything by anyone involved in the abomination, and he encouraged us to do the same. (I know David Bowie's pocketbook is seriously hurting from losing his teenage Southern Baptist demographic after his role as Pontius Pilate.)

Willem Dafoe is a kind of anti-Christ, not in a Tim LaHaye/Jerry B. Jenkins sense, but in that his attitude is opposite of Christ's in almost every scene. Scorsese's Christ is not sinless, he's just too cowardly to commit any particularly noteworthy sins. He wants to be a regular guy, but God won't leave him alone. Neither will Satan, for that matter. As a result, he comes down off the cross, gets married a few times, has kids, chews out Paul for misrepresenting him. Judas acts like the only one with much sense at all; despite Judas' best efforts, Jesus has ruined humanity's chance at salvation. Maybe there are other interpretations, but that's what came across after one (admittedly sleepy) viewing.

Any Christians left in the theater probably walked out by the Jesus/Mary Magdelene sex scene (which our professor graciously censored), but they missed the big surprise twist at the end of the movie:

It was a dream. The whole time. Like Dorothy and Donnie, Jesus has a vision of an outrageous scenario in which he escapes the regular world and has a chance to do what he's always wanted to do. Then he wakes up, back on the cross, and the credits roll in all their 80's majesty. Peter Gabriel sings.

It's like bad Bible fanfiction. As far as craft goes, Last Temptation is to film as Left Behind is to literature. It just happens to swing crazy-liberal instead of crazy-conservative. I don't know which one is more upsetting. Last Temptation is more blasphemous, but Left Behind is more misleading. At least Scorsese disclaimed at the beginning that his film is not based at all on the Gospels, while LaHaye and Jenkins are marketed like their novels are realistic portrayals of Revelation.

---

The media saturates us with its own images of Jesus and the church. They are loudest when they use a microphone and megaphone at the same time. What are they finding out about him when they come to church?

Ain't it crazy
What's revealed when you're not looking all that close
Ain't it crazy
How we put to death the ones we need the most?

I would never budge till Spring crept over my windowsill.

2009-02-26T06:30:00.001-06:00

Lately, I have been sleeping an average of fourteen hours a day. Some days it is closer to twelve. Yesterday it was closer to sixteen. Regardless, it is too much sleep.

I finally got in to my doctor and told her my concerns: I am sleeping as much as I slept when I was depressed, except I feel fine when I'm awake. I do not have much of an appetite, but I seem to be gaining weight.

My doctor's diagnosis: Hibernation. I have been hibernating. People do not hibernate. Squirrels hibernate.

Among the factors that have triggered this denning are:

endless Illinois winter darkness
cold that makes it painful to go outside
richness of filling winter food
side effects of medication

The nights are getting shorter, and the snow is turning to muck, so that bodes well for the environmental factors of my sleepiness. It is easier to exercise when I can breathe deeply without my lungs turning to ice. Tomatoes, spinach, broccoli, oranges and berries -- all my favorite spring-and-summer foods -- will be bright and edible, not like the bruised and mushy produce I passed over at the market today.

As for the anti-depressant, it is time to scale it back. I will be tapering off of Effexor, which I've taken for two years, and switching to the milder Cymbalta, which is a much more attractive name for a drug. It makes me think of Cymbeline, though I do not take that as an unequivically good sign, since there are several poisoning attempts in that play.

---

"Well Water"

What a girl called "the dailiness of life"
(Adding an errand to your errand. Saying,
"Since you're up ..." Making you a means to
A means to a means to) is well water
Pumped from an old well at the bottom of the world.
The pump you pump the water from is rusty
And hard to move and absurd, a squirrel-wheel
A sick squirrel turns slowly, through the sunny
Inexorable hours. And yet sometimes
The wheel turns of its own weight, the rusty
Pump pumps over your sweating face the clear
Water, cold, so cold! you cup your hands
And gulp from them the dailiness of life.

- Randall Jarrell

Icicles falling in the dark

2009-02-05T15:06:00.003-06:00

Yesterday, the thermometer showed almost forty degrees. I felt like I should be in shorts or a dress.

Last night I stayed up trying to tell the difference between a draft of a poem and an outline of an essay. According to my poet-friends, the line break is what distinguishes poetry from prose, but outlines have line breaks, too.

While I tried to puzzle this out, there was a crash. Then another. Then another. It sounded like the house was being shelled, like I should wake up the girls and sandbag us all into the basement.

It was the icicles falling off the roof. Huge icicles, as big around as my arm, and sharp at the ends in the way that icicles typically are. They had time to get that big and terrifying during the coldest week I can ever remember.

So, the Sun, thanks for coming. I really appreciate it. But you pissed off Winter, and now someone could get impaled. Really, we should coordinate this better.

---

But it's so hard to dance that way
When it's cold and there's no music
Well, your old hometown's so far away
But inside your head there's a record that's playing
A song called hold on.

It feels like years since you've been here.

2009-01-28T23:20:00.003-06:00

Dear the sun,

Hey, how are you? More importantly, where are you?

We all miss you. No one even makes eye contact walking down the sidewalk. We stare at our boots and hide in our scarves.

Right now it feels like you've never been here, like we've lived like this forever, like nothing will ever change. Things have lost their warmth and color.

I know I've gotten upset at you before for coming on too strong, even for burning me, but all that's behind us now. Forgive me for complaining? I want you to come back. I miss you.

Love and tearcicles,
Alyssa

The Male and the Floss

2009-01-19T13:51:00.006-06:00

Dentists don't bother me. Dental hygienists make me nervous.

My old dentist retired, so I had to go to a new dentist over Christmas. This meant a new dental hygienist. I was used to the hygienist who asked me open-ended questions, usually about Harry Potter, and then stuck her hands in my mouth before I could answer.

The new dental hygienist's tactics are rather different.

"You don't floss enough. You know, not flossing has been linked to prostate cancer."

If her hands hadn't been in my mouth, I would have explained to her that I've already taken measures to prevent getting prostate cancer. Namely, I don't have a prostate.

To be sure, I have done extensive research. My findings report that people with prostates don't cry in the candy aisle at Walgreens because they're overwhelmed by the selection and can't decide what kind of chocolate they want.* I am officially disqualified.

*Thankfully, I have a boyfriend who is tolerant of this, and who surprised me with a back-up Reeses in case I changed my mind about the M&M's.

Mugged

2008-11-21T04:26:00.005-06:00

A recent dream of mine took place in a white and silver coffee shop that looked like it was designed by IKEA.

I was sitting next to Kate Olsen, who was talking about a play she'd seen in Prague. Across from us was the queen of England, who listened politely to Kate for awhile, but then pulled out books about English architecture and tried to prove that architecture was England's answer to Czech theater. Her Highness was cheerful but competitive.

Realizing I was the third wheel, I excused myself from the booth. Soon, I noticed I was being followed by a 40-something man. I'd leant my car to someone, which meant I was without my keys and thus without my pepper spray keychain. I dodged into the women's restroom, which happened to be behind the cash register. Instead of a mirror over the sink there was a window, from which I could see Kate and Her Highness; Tim Hunt was alone in the next booth.

The bathroom door opened; the man had followed me in. This was the first time I'd seen his face. It was Otto, a guy from an iO class I took a couple of years ago.

Otto? What are you doing?

His voice was gentle. "I'm going to mug you."

Otto. I know you.

He looked pleasant. "Yes."

You were in my Level 2 class.

Not threatening, not sarcastic, not even mischeivous. Just pleasant. "Yes."

You can't mug me.

"I'm going to take your money."

I'm not even a stranger. We took a class together. I think we're Facebook friends.

"I'm mugging you now." I tried to yell for help, but my voice wouldn't project. Even though Tim could clearly see me through the mirror/window, he acted like he was watching a scene instead of a crime. Maybe that's because I couldn't stop laughing at how silly it would be of Otto to mug me.

But I knew he was serious, that he would actually hurt me and steal from me. Even so, I couldn't stop laughing, so Tim thought everything was fine. After I wouldn't break eye contact with him, though, he came into the restroom, too. He was pretending to be a monkey. This scared Otto away.

I couldn't make Tim understand that I really needed help. Perhaps laughing might have detracted from any sense of urgency I might otherwise have conveyed. Of course I was laughing; it was funny. Why would Otto, why would anyone, mug someone he already knew, someone with whom he was on a how-have-you-been-I'm-fine-thanks terms? That doesn't mean I wanted to be mugged, though.

That is why you should carry pepper spray everywhere. Even around your friends, even in your dreams.

Dreaming through the Noise

2008-11-18T13:08:00.007-06:00

It's been three months since I posted. Since then, my time has been taken up by:

- Getting flooded. I was homeless for a very short period in August, a time that culminated in a tornado, pepper spray, and getting lost in the parking lot of Nordstrom's.
- Finding the rhythm of school.
- Living in a very dramatic house that is mostly full of theater girls.
- Memorizing a lot of Shakespeare.
- Directing Faux Posse and Post Script Ambiguity for wheatonIMPROV.
- Cowering at the prospect of job and/or graduate school applications.

Amidst the insanity, why the revival of the blog? Currently, I am confined, restless, to a couch. My voice is completely gone, as gone as the sun, the maple leaves, free time. I hope my voice returns sooner than any of those things are liable to here to Wheaton College.

It has made me seasick to try and read for school. That might have less to do with the head cold and more to do with that the book of the moment is Absalom, Absalom by William Faulkner. Reading Miss Rosa's memories feels like watching a scene filmed without a tripod, Blair Witch style. I suspect anyone trying to decipher the Sutpen family tree would be a little disoriented, even without the cold medicine.

So instead of reading Faulkner, writing an annotated bibliography, drafting a prompt book, rehearsing As You Like It, or working on my grad school application, I am drinking juice through a straw, dozing through Vienna Teng albums, binging on Pushing Daisies -- I am coveting all of Chuck's clothes, though I'm not sure they'd be as fun in a shades-of-gray Chicago winter; they might only work in a world of supersaturated color -- and fighting off the gathering panic about how behind I'm going to be when I go back to class.

---

And she dreams through the noise, her weight against me
Face pressed into the corduroy grooves
Maybe it means nothing, but I'm afraid to move.

Metaphors be with you.

2008-07-23T11:26:00.005-05:00

José is 16 years old. He used to try to hit on me until he figured out that I am 21. "Oh, I'm really sorry," he said, "I thought you were 15."

My boss, Ron, had me working one-on-one with José last week, because he was having a hard time understanding what a metaphor was and how to create one. Ron wanted the kids to use a metaphor to describe a sculpture in Millennium Park and then to use that to write a character monologue.

Ron's example of a metaphor was comparing himself to a burning candle. He is short, and he is getting shorter as he gets older, but he refuses to go out just yet, and he wants to spread the fire he has to as many other wicks as possible before he is extinguished.

With that as an example, José was convinced that the definition of a metaphor was a series of ideas that aren't actually true and don't make any sense together anyway. He kept trying to create something that would fit that definition, but everything he wrote made too much sense or else felt too true, and he got frustrated. That's when Ron sent him to me.

We sat together and stared at the sculpture. He told me the sculpture looked like an upside-down turtle. "But the monologue is supposed to be from a person, not a turtle. I can't write a turtle monologue. I don't know what turtles think, and turtles aren't people, and, and --" Ok, José, calm down. Write for a few minutes about what an upside-down turtle is like.

He wrote: "Stuck. Helpless. Vulnerable, because his shell is in the wrong place. He keeps trying to get up, but he rolls back. He might get killed and eaten."

Now, José, forget the turtle, and talk to me about a person who is stuck and helpless and vulnerable and is protecting himself in all the wrong places and can't get up no matter how hard he tries.

José named the character Ben. Ben used to live with a girl named Maria, but it started getting weird after they slept together, and she moved out, heartbroken. He wasn't heartbroken. He hadn't let himself get close to her. He wouldn't let himself get close to a girl at all. But that was years ago, and he's starting to get lonely and desperate. He works at Chili's, and he should talk to the girls there, especially the one he thinks is so pretty, but he can't, because he is protecting himself from getting hurt. Ben has a best friend named Adam. Adam calls Ben and talks about the latest drama with his boyfriend. This makes Ben tired, and it makes him miss Maria. Not Maria, because he never really liked her, but he misses the idea of Maria.

See, José? Ben is an upside-down turtle. "No, that's not true at all. He's a waiter at Chili's." But he's stuck and miserable, even though he's tried to protect himself.

"Oh. .... Oh! Oh! It's a metaphor!" And then he wrote for twenty minutes.

Wedding Days

2008-07-14T18:18:00.013-05:00

There have been so many weddings this summer: A.J. and Catherine, Joe and Jane, Ryan and Gretchen, Spencer and Marjorie, Nathaniel and Bethany, David and Emma. I think Mike and Chelsea are next, and I'm sure I'm forgetting a couple or two. I'm not feeling too overloaded, because of all of those, I've only gotten to see the Spencer-and-Marjorie wedding. It was lovely, but I do not feel old enough for my friends to be marrying each other.

I babysit for three families. Two of those families have 5 year old girls. They are teaching me different perspectives about how marriage works.

One of them, Lauren, likes to play princess, and she has me be the queen, who is either good or evil, depending on whether she is the mother or the stepmother. The plot that recurs most often is the one where Princess Lauren has to find someone to marry her or she will die.

Me: How come you'll die?
Lauren: Because that's what happens if you don't get married.
Me: I'm not married.
Lauren: That's because you're not beautiful. Only beautiful people get married. Maybe one day you will get married, and then you will be beautiful like my mom.

Usually, the game ends when Princess Lauren has gotten bored of lying still on the ground waiting for her little brother (Christopher, age 3) to man up and marry her. She dies and pouts for awhile, but he is too busy playing fireman to notice.

This weekend, I was cleaning up the kids' supper things when I heard this conversation between Tyler (age 8) and Grace (age 5).

Grace: You have too many girlfriends, Tyler.
Tyler: Yeah, well, you're in love with Joe.
Grace: I am not.
Tyler: Yes, you are. You want to marry Joe.
Grace: I do not.
Tyler: Then who do you want to marry?
Grace: I am not going to marry anyone until I meet him in college.
Tyler: But what if Joe goes to the same college you go to?
Grace: I still won't marry him.
Tyler: Grace! That's so mean! He'll be so sad!

The argument went on until Tyler showed me some of his favorite Feist music videos while Grace took a bath.

Tyler is 8, and he has favorite Feist videos. Maybe if he didn't already have so many girlfriends, I would wait and marry him.

---

I've got my car all packed with cassette tapes and sweaters and loose change and cheap cigarettes.

Ah, who cares? You always end up in the city.

2008-07-09T16:17:00.005-05:00

I have become a commuter. Monday through Thursday, I take the 6:57am train into the city. Then I walk a few blocks and get on the subway to Division, then walk a few more blocks to my internship. I am there by 8:45.

My internship has a strict tank top-and-sweatpants-only dress code, so I stick out among the businesspeople in blazers and slacks. I use 10-ride Metra passes and can walk as purposefully as any of them, with iPod and travel mug (of tea, not coffee) and everything, but it is still obvious I'm not going to an office building.

I am an intern at Free Street Theater. Before the middle and high school students got there, the college-aged interns wrote a play. It is now being performed for younger kids in parks around Chicago. If you meet a character who is a lot like Martha Stewart except that she eats children, that's the character I wrote.

Now that the student-artists are there, a typical day begins with an hour and a half of yoga, some contact improv lessons, and writing exercises. After lunch, we do workshops in anything from the meanings of symbols to poetry writing to organic movement. (I am increasingly confused about the definition of "organic." My cereal is organic, and so is this piece of concept art I watched, and so are things with carbon.)

It's all solid acting and writing tools, and yoga is hard work, but the whole thing is couched in vaguely New Age rhetoric. We talk a lot about being free from the self. We also talk about accessing the self and exploring the self and tapping into the self and connecting the deep well of the self with the big mind of the universe. I do not know what most of that stuff means, but it's getting good work out of these kids, most of whom are from poorer school districts that don't have much in the way of arts programs. Still, the whole Self talk is confusing. I tend to ignore it.

The most impressive thing is how the directors treat the kids. The kids learn how to eat well, how to exercise, how to sit still and pay attention, how to give and receive, how to interpret symbols and metaphors, but none of it is condescending. The directors treat the kids like artists, and the kids act like artists.

Right now, the students are working on their solo silent performances, which they'll take to the streets next week. Part of my job as an intern will be to help make sure the kids don't get kidnapped or anything.

The rest of my job is to be part of projects that include fitting as many people of different sizes and races as possible into the smallest car possible, driving five miles, and eating vegan food.

There is no Free Street on Fridays, but I go into the city anyway for my Writing for the Stage class at iO. I didn't make the Harold team, but this elective comes with experimental performances, so I'll still get some stage time. Classes without stage time seem kind of pointless to me right now. How else are you to find out if what you are learning works unless you try it in front of an audience?

---

Someone somewhere asked me, "Is there anything in particular I can help you with?" All I ever wanted help with was you.

Holding Out for a Gyro

2008-06-23T15:08:00.004-05:00

Last night was the closing night of my 5b class's graduation shows. I didn't know eight weeks could go by so quickly.

In eight shows, I have pushed my brother through a Stargate, witnessed my mother hang herself, researched cancer, fingerprinted a coffee drinker, used my roommate's toothbrush, played bass in a girl band, eaten seven oatmeal pies, avoided a lesbian affair, and been unsuccessful at culturing my own pearls.

This means I am officially an iO alumna, but I'm not finished with that place yet. On July 4th, I start Jim Carlson's writing elective. I am intimidated out of my mind. Unreasonable? Probably. Still true, though.

The director of the training center told us that it could be anywhere from a few days to a few weeks before we find out who of our class is cast on a Harold team. There are about thirty of us, and only about ten of us will be cast.

Thanks to people who came and showed Holding Out for a Gyro and Ill-Fitting Leotard some love, especially the ones who braved game nights in Wrigleyville. I did not have a single show unsupported by a friend in the audience, which is not something most of the performers can say. I have good friends.

---

"Ok, guys, two-thirds of the way in, you know what to do: jet packs."
- Someone in the green room before every show

Thanksgiving for a Habitat

2008-06-21T18:49:00.002-05:00

The header at the top of the page is a picture of what my brother gave me for Christmas a couple of years ago. It was a frame containing six photographs from around our house in Texas, one photograph for each letter of my name.

The first "A" is a picture of the swing set in our backyard.

"L" is our roof, complete with Christmas lights.

"Y" is our mailbox and a late afternoon glare on our cul de sac.

The first "S" is a curtain rod from our kitchen.

The second "S" is the gate to the fence around our backyard.

The last "A" is a ladder. I can't remember if it's ours or our neighbors.

Thomas would have had his work cut out for him if my parents had gone through with naming me "Katherine."

I have lived in that house since I was two. My parents designed it, or at least modified the house plans. No one else has ever lived in it.

In August, when my brother goes to college, my parents will move into a new house, which is being built right now.

The new house will not be much smaller than the old one. It will be a little more open, and it will have one less bathroom. Mom says she doesn't want to clean three bathrooms if only two people live there.

The only other difference is that our old house on Oakwood sits on two acres of land, most of it covered in oak trees. It was a great place to play when Thomas and I were little, and more lately his friends have used it for paintball, but it's overgrown with poison ivy now.

So I guess it makes sense for my family to move. Thomas will be in Arizona, and it is unlikely that I'll move back to Texas any time soon, much less to Greenville. I am still sad about it, though, because that is my swing set I used to fall out of and my gate I used to accidentally leave open. I have never lived anywhere else but campus housing.

The main thing that will bother me is having that new house smell when I visit my parents. It will smell like new wood and new beige paint and new upholstry. I babysit in a few cookie cutter houses that smell like that. I cannot figure out how they smell so new; they should smell like Cheerios and Play Doh and crayons and wet wipes and baby's hair. Part of it, I think, is that these kids only play with battery-operated toys.

The townhouse I live in for the summer smells like candles and soy sauce and banana bread and gas from the stove and cigarettes from the back porch. Mostly, though, it smells like outside, because we keep our windows open, partly because we like the breeze, but partly because we can't really figure out how to close some of them. The furniture is mismatched, we have to jiggle the handle to make the downstairs toilet stop making noise, and there is an odd light fixture hanging just above eye level in the middle of the room. Fewer people hit their head on it now that we have covered it with ugly, eye-catching pink fabric.

Those things all make it feel homey to me, even though they're nothing like home. I just hate that new house smell.

---

"A living-room, the catholic area you
(Thou, rather) and I may enter
without knocking, leave without a bow, confronts
each visitor with a style,

a secular faith: he compares its dogmas
with his, and decides whether
he would like to see more of us (Spotless rooms
where nothing's left lying about

chill me, so do cups used for ash-trays or smeared
with lip-stick: the homes I warm to,
though seldom wealthy, always convey a feeling
of bills being promptly settled

with cheques that don't bounce.) There's no We at an instant,
only Thou and I, two regions
of protestant being which nowhere overlap:
a room is too small, therefore,

if its occupants cannot forget at will
that they are not alone, too big
if it gives them any excuse in a quarrel
for raising their voices ..."

- W. H. Auden, from "The Common Life"

First Post

2008-06-18T16:26:00.001-05:00

Charity tells me that my playing voice has the palate of Easter eggs, except without being pastel, and it is shaped like rubber jacks. My directing voice, though, is cubist.

I do not know if this blog will be more Easter eggish or more cubist.

---

I have only to break into the tightness of a strawberry, and I see summer -- its dust and lowering skies. It remains for me a season of storms. The parched days and sticky nights are undistinguished in my mind, but the storms, the violent sudden storms, both frightened and quenched me.

- Toni Morrison, from The Bluest Eye